The First Lady of Television by David Lambert (All reviews)
6/23/2002
"Luck. There was no doubt about it. The show had been singularly blessed with unbelievably good luck from the very moment of its conception." - from "Laughs, Luck...and Lucy" by Producer/Head Writer Jess Oppenheimer
Where do I start? How does one describe and/or recap the granddaddy - or is that grandmamma? - of all sitcoms?
Let's start with 1960. A producer of a series on NBC called The Lieutenant is under contract to MGM studios with this show, and has been asked by them to think up more series ideas. He takes some time, but he uses it to polish a series idea that had been floating around in his head for quite some while...and MGM seems to like it at first. But, ultimately, they reject it, and this fellow - let's call him "Gene Roddenberry" - was free to shop it around to other studios. He next showed his favorite idea to Oscar Katz, a Vice President at a pioneering television production facility called "DesiLu", and the concept is picked up...and science fiction television history is made. Yaay!
But how did DesiLu come into being, to be in the sweet position to pick up Star Trek when MGM foolishly passed on it? It all started over a decade prior, with another decision, this time at CBS, which also was almost made foolishly. Almost.
Early in the 50's, television was starting to take off, and many stars of Radio and Film were setting their sights on the new medium. Lucille Ball happened to be a star of both, having just been successful in two movies (Fancy Pants starring Bob Hope, plus her own lead in The Fuller Brush Girl) and continuing her flourishing CBS radio show, My Favorite Husband. She wanted to make the move to television. CBS wanted her to make the move. My Favorite Husband producer Jess Oppenheimer wanted to make the move, too. The only problem was...what to do about Desi?
Lucille Ball's husband of ten years was a thriving bandleader from Cuba, with a thick Latin accent, who traveled a lot with his band. Lucy wasn't too pleased at being apart so much, and so she wanted Desi to join her in whatever TV show was cooked up for her. But CBS nixed the idea, stating that nobody would believe that this tube couple was really married. Miss Ball scoffed at this, of course, since she and Desi actually were married in real life! But CBS held fast.
So, four things happened: First, Lucy and Desi made their commitment to performing together official, by forming "DesiLu". Second, during a break in the radio series, Lucy went on the road with Desi doing Vaudeville routines...to huge crowds and success. Third, the couple invested $5000 of their own money - a tidy sum at the time - into getting the ball rolling on an audition show (a "pilot", to use the modern term) made withOUT the assistance of CBS. Fourth, rival NBC expressed interest in one of the test scripts for that audition show. With the handwriting on the wall, CBS relented, and avoided making a foolish mistake. The pilot was made and bought. I Love Lucy was born!
The DVDs: "Season 1, Volume 1"
For those of you who've been under a rock and never ever heard of this show (or if you're a future historian stumbling upon this review, of all things!), I Love Lucy took the basic concept of a married couple in funny situations, and brought it over the top. Waaay over the top! Desi Arnaz played Ricky Ricardo, who (like Desi in real life) was a Cuban-born bandleader married to a redhead named Lucy. Ricky's performances were at the Tropicana nightclub in New York, not too far from where he and Lucy lived in an apartment. But it was his missus who played a role that was quite different from her genuine situation. Instead of portraying a glamorous, funny, talented star of the screen, Lucy Ricardo was instead a screwball of an irresponsible wife, no good with money, but ingenious enough to hatch plot after plot to get into show business, even though Mrs. Ricardo was portrayed as a no-talent wannabe. But Ricky didn't mind; he LOVED Lucy. And so did we!
The Ricardos' best friends were Fred and Ethel Mertz, their landlords and downstairs neighbors. The antics of Lucy and Ethel are legendary, and got off to a rollicking start in the very first aired episode, "The Girls Want To Go To A Nightclub".
It bears mentioning here that the shows were not shot and aired in the same order. After the pilot was shot and used to sell the show, it was put away for forty years and not seen in all of that time! The next show shot, "Lucy Thinks Ricky Is Trying To Murder Her", was actually aired fourth (therefore, it appears on DVD Volume 2).
So the shows are placed on the DVDs in airdate order, starting with the unaired Pilot (called in some circles "The Test Episode"), and then the rest of the disc covers the episodes aired during the show's first month, that of October 1951:
The Lost Pilot
The Girls Want To Go To A Nightclub
Be a Pal
The Diet
When a show starts on the DVD, you are treated first to a segue sequence, which ends with a version of the "heart-on-satin" layout that names the episode. An overlay appears at the bottom that names the episode's original airdate. From there, the show itself begins.
There was some confusion surrounding what this release would consist of. About a year prior, in the late Summer of 2001, subscription-only service Columbia House made available some I Love Lucy DVD's via their "Lucy Club" subscription service. The first disc they provided was a "best-of" affair, and then everything thereafter was in-airdate-order. Meanwhile, Paramount (who inherited the main rights to the series when parent company Viacom bought out CBS) was stating that their own plans to release the show on DVD were cancelled...that "the original materials are in poor condition; we didn't feel we could meet our own standards if we released a DVD". So imagine everyone's surprise when, a mere nine months later, leaks occurred that Paramount was bringing I.L.L. out to DVD pretty quickly!
As unofficial information about these Paramount releases circulated, word came from sources-in-the-know that they would be the exact same discs as Columbia House's releases. But there were concerns over the quality of those releases (more on that later), and so folks started to compare features on each version. I will make a long story short here, and sum it up this way: I myself have never seen the Columbia House releases. Neither Paramount nor Columbia House are officially stating yet one way or the other. However, after reading detailed descriptions from owners of the CH versions of these discs, I am 100% positive that these releases are identical to each other. So, if you already own the Columbia House product, you don't need to repurchase them; there's nothing to gain. At least from what I can tell!
Menu Design & Navigation:
Both of the first two volumes of I Love Lucy - this one and Volume 2 - feature an easy-to-use navigation system that starts with, gratefully, a "Play All" button. Choosing this will play all four episodes on the DVD. Or, you can continue on down the main menu to choose which episode you want to view. Moving the cursor to the right will choose each episode's index.
Each episode, including the Pilot, is broken into five chapters. You can easily move past the all-too-familiar opening credits and get right into the action, if you choose. A marvelous addition to the chapter list is the ability to choose a "Song Selection"; this lets you go straight to any musical numbers you want to see in any episodes that happen to contain them! Since singing is a big part of Lucy's entertainment value, this was a well-though-out navigational aid on these DVD's. Wonderfully, a chapter-stop insert is included in the DVD packaging, which lists not only the chapter stops but the song selections as well! Commendable.
The Bonus Material menu simply lists each of the possible supplements you may want to explore, and in some cases have sub-menus underneath them. Each item has its own navigational structure that is appropriate for it's nature. In each case I was able to maneuver where I wanted to go rather quickly and easily, or abort what I was doing and get back to either the Main or Bonus menus. My only minor complaint was that the radio show does not allow you to fast forward or rewind...you have to let it play all the way through from start to finish. A minor quibble, though.
The only other complaint I could possibly make of the menu screens is that the background shots they use are repetitive. They are collages of Lucy Ricardo's funniest moments from throughout the run of the show. They are not specific to the episodes on the disc, and it gets old seeing the same thing back there. Making it a bit more varied would encourage more exploration of the materials, in my opinion.
Video
As I mentioned before, there was confusion surrounding this DVD release, as to whether or not this was the same as the Columbia House subscription-only offering available from about a year ago. One of the reasons for that concern was because the first disc in the Columbia House set - a best-of disc which Paramount has chosen NOT to offer (instead, they will present those episodes in airdate order) - was stated to be of extremely poor video quality. In fact, it was so poor that the Gregg Oppenheimer, the son of I Love Lucy Producer/Head Writer Jess Oppenheimer, instructed Columbia House to remaster the shows on that disc, and apparently they did.
The discs authored afterward had few complaints, and I am sitting here comparing those complaints to the notes I took while viewing the disc I'm reviewing. Not surprisingly, the positives and negatives both match up pretty closely. Another reason to believe these are the same items.
The good: There is a blessed lack of speckles and other artifacts throughout the regular series episodes on this disc. It is remarkably clean! Distribution of shades throughout the gray scale are rather even and deep, and the picture is very clean and easy to watch, especially on smaller (30" or less) tubes.
The bad: Focus is soft in some places, especially as the cameras move quickly...but that ought to be expected in a pioneering show that was shot live before a studio audience. As I said, the gray scale distribution is well done, but on occasion the black level don't quite go deep enough (this is more visible on my HDTV than on my standard television). Furthermore, as the camera pans, a loss-of-resolution occurs that results in a blurriness of the type more associated with DVD authoring than with fast movement. I doubt any of those things will be noticeable enough to affect your viewing, however. The most noticeable video issue is what I will refer to here as "splice jumps". Whatever the source actually is in this case, there is a brief "jump" in the action and "shift" in the camera angle that is usually associated with the loss of the frames where two reels are overlapped and spliced together. This is jarring enough to take you out of the show, but only momentarily.
The ugly: Everything I said above goes out the window where the "Lost Pilot Episode" is concerned. Resolution is low, blurriness is high, artifacts and lines and blemishes plague your screen, and the brightness is way too, um, bright. It doesn't look like any restoration was done for this episode. That is almost a crime, in my opinion. Even if the footage had to be run through Lowry's DVNR process (like Citizen Kane was), it would be worth it to have a cleaned-up copy of this gem, this piece of history. It is still very watchable, and you will enjoy it enough to overlook the problems, in all likelihood. But it could have been better. Much better.
Audio
The audio on this disc is presented in English and in Spanish. It is presented in mono-aural sound, exactly like it was recorded in 1951. While there are some audio dropouts present, they are few and far between. The sound has been cleaned up as much as possible for this DVD presentation. In fact, voice-overs were restored just for the purpose of authoring this disc! The mostly-clean audio presentation is especially enjoyable during the many musical numbers that appear throughout the various episodes. You won't need a receiver to enjoy this soundtrack!
The Original Opening Sequence to the series. Back in the days before cigarette advertising was banned from television, tobacco companies like Phillip Morris were major sponsors of broadcast pioneers, like Lucy. Hence, the original opening credits sequence of I Love Lucy consisted of stick figures with caricatures of Lucy and Ricky climbing onto the top of an enormous pack of Phillip Morris cigarettes, with ropes in hand. Each would toss the rope over their side of the pack. Lucy ably slid down her rope, while Ricky dove off, prompting Lucy to catch him. After a bow, the figures each tugged their ropes, Venetian-blind-style, changing the face of the cigarette pack to first the starring credits, and then to the Title screen. Watch it, it's fun! However, times have changed, and the anti-smoking lobby would no doubt protest the restoration of this sequence as the standard opening to every episode on each I Love Lucy discs. Especially since Desi Arnaz's cause of death was lung cancer. Instead, the disc's authors chose to make it available as a bonus feature.
A look at the Guest Cast appearing in the various episodes on this disc. It includes interesting information about these people, their appearances, and/or circumstances before and/or after the appearance. Look for information about the original narrator for the lost Pilot episode, and then check the Pilot itself for even more information about why the producers of this DVD brought him out of retirement half-a-century later!
Flubs are shown, both visual (why did Desi go digging in his pocket during a band number?) and dialogue-related. Also included is "Special Footage" not seen in half-a-century, such as extra (cigarette-pack-and-stick-figure-oriented) animations and filmed framing sequences with the main cast, designed to introduce re-broadcasts of first-season episodes during the 2nd season (since Lucille Ball was busy having a baby - Desi Arnaz Jr.- at the time, reruns were born!).
A "Behind the Scenes" audio featurette containing an excerpt from Producer/Hear Writer Jess Oppenheimer's book, Laughs, Luck...and Lucy: How I Came To Create The Most Popular Sitcom Of All Time. It even includes snippets from Lucy's radio series that Oppenheimer produced, My Favorite Husband. The excerpt is read aloud by Larry Dobkin.
A terrific extra is included on this DVD: a show from the radio series that inspired episodes of I Love Lucy: the My Favorite Husband broadcast of "Iris and Liz's Easter". I cannot even begin to praise the greatness of this treasure being included here! Radio broadcasts were an astounding art form of their own, and set the pattern for television broadcasts later on. Now a new generation can appreciate this clever show, whose success led directly to the pioneering comedy series that this disc celebrates.
Summary
There is absolutely no doubt in my mind: this is a must-own disc for anyone who is reading this review. If you are a member of the TVShowsOnDVD site, then you are interested in television, period...so you should go get this disc. If you chose to read this review, you are probably a fan of Lucy, and deserve to have this in your collection. Even if you are reading the review because you are just mildly curious, you should go on and get the disc anyway.
This is where it all started. Sitcoms were born in the form still used today with this show. It is the series that begat prerecording on film, that begat the three-camera form, that begat reruns! That pioneered so many concepts that came into standard use later on. And don't forget that a decade down the road was Star Trek...a show who's following taught Lucy devotees the true meaning of the word "fandom", so that the show survives to this day. This series set the tone for all that would follow in television comedy. And THESE are the episodes that started the series onto that road. On this disc is where TV history really began.
But forget the history. Forget the early days of television. Forget all the other reasons to own this disc, and just remember one thing:
